NEWS!

You are hereby called to serve as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You are assigned to labor in the Chile Osorno Mission. You should report to the Provo Missionary Training Center on Wednesday, January 16, 2013. You will prepare to teach the gospel in the Spanish language.

It finally came! I have been waiting for a very long time and I was so excited to find out that today was the day! I was surrounded by family and friends both in person and through every single method of technology we could access. I could barely read this paragraph out loud because I was smiling so hugely. I am very excited to serve in Chile, and January can't come any faster! My oldest sister served her mission in Concepcion, so she was very excited to give me the run-down on the Chilean culture. I guess I need to start brushing up on my Spanish, and until I leave you can bet I will be counting down the days! Hasta que nos encontremos otra vez.

Harvest is the Happiest Time

Blogs are no fun to read without pictures. Am I right? So your wait was worth it. I will now tell you about life on the farm. 

I'm baaaaaaack

"kleen me" Thanks Eli. Good advice

my brother loves it when I take him on truck drives with me. 

this apple was bright red and delicious looking when I left it in the car. Then it turned 130 degrees in that car and cooked that apple to the core 

I was mowing my cousins lawn and may or may not have accidentally cut this mouse's tail off. Don't worry, he lived. I think.  

The country is the wildlife capital of the world 

I found a baby bird in the cellar!

he had absolutely no fear of me. That, and he couldn't fly.

Today's exciting news for me was that for the first time, I drove a manual truck all by myself! I have never even driven a stick shift car in my life, let alone a truck. It was pretty exciting. People were tired of bringing trucks to the shop so I could wash/clean them, so I got enough of a lesson to be able to do it by myself. It's the little things, guys. 

I have also developed an unhealthy love for country music. I'm not sure what happened there exactly but I don't think I hate it. I think it comes with the territory of working on a farm all day. That, and my Spanish is improving exponentially.

Spiders and Earwigs and Owls...Oh My!

It's that most wonderful time of year again! Harvest!! This year I get to work with my sister which has turned out to be more fun than I thought it would be. We haven't had a lot of driving to do yet, so we got sent out to the potato cellar to do some stripping there. Oh, stripping duct tape off of the huge pipes they tape together to pile the potatoes on top of...not the other kind. We decided to bring some music along today because that task can be less than enjoyable in silence. I brought my docking station and we hooked up some tunes to the only outlet we could find, in the attic of the cellar like 20 feet above us. We had some nice surround sound and it worked pretty well. On our way down the stairs and back into the cellar, we spooked an owl that was living in what it thought would stay a nice quiet cellar. It had no place to go so it flew straight at Jessica's head. She screamed really loud, enough to scare it back into the cellar. The thing was huge. I'm talking like pteranodon size. It flew across the floor and tried to get out the other side which had bars across the door. It finally found its way in between 2 of the bars and flew outside. It was hands down the funniest thing I had seen that day.

We continued pulling the duct tape off the pipe and found that some of the tape was more rotted than the others. I pulled a really old rotten piece off the pipe only to uncover a family of probably 20 earwigs just chillin under it. That pipe didn't exactly get finished. We decided that driving the grain trucks was a lot more fun than battling old tape.

I can only imagine the stories I will be able to tell before harvest is over. So if you need us, just come on out to the farm. We'll be there :)

Fun side note: my mission papers will be here any day now! Feel free to be excited with me. 

Bonding

I made a quick trip down to Salt Lake yesterday to pick up my sister from the airport. The ensuing pictures are proof that an hour and 45 minutes in a car is a looooong time to wait and we did not love it.

had time for some nail painting...go usa!  

and a little pit stop at cabella's